By Susan Dickson
Staff Writer
The Orange County Board of Commissioners voted 5-2 on Tuesday to close the county dental clinic at Carr Mill Mall and consolidate dental services at the county’s Hillsborough clinic.
The Carrboro clinic will close effective June 30, 2011, when the county’s lease on the space expires. The county staffs part-time dental clinics at Carr Mill Mall and at the Whitted Human Services Center on West Tryon Street in Hillsborough, with the Carrboro clinic open two days a week and the Hillsborough clinic open three. Under the approved plan, the Hillsborough dental clinic will expand to serve patients five days a week when the Carrboro clinic closes.
“One of the things that we are aware of when we look at the map of points of where people receive services is that we have people from all over the county receiving services in Hillsborough, and that is not as true when you look at the Chapel Hill-Carrboro map,†county health director Rosemary Summers said. “People are a little bit more hesitant to travel to the southern part of the county than they may be to the northern.â€
Summers said that the cost to lease the Carr Mill facility is $65,000 a year. To run two full-time clinics, costs to the county would total about $740,000, compared with about $500,000 for a single full-time clinic.
According to the county, the Dental Health Services Division of the county health department provided about 4,000 clinic visits and 6,235 dental screenings for pre-school and school-age children last year, including many for low-income and uninsured residents. Under the new plan, visits would increase to 5,100 annually.
Commissioners Alice Gordon and Mike Nelson voted against closing the clinic.
“I feel like we’re cutting past the bone, and I’ve reached the point where I can’t cut anymore. It just doesn’t feel like the right thing to do,†Nelson said. “I would really prefer to work on this a little while longer.â€
Gordon said she was concerned that residents of the southern part of the county would not be able to get to the Hillsborough clinic.
“I don’t know that we’ve done enough to figure out what the impact is [on those receiving dental services] and how to mitigate it,†Gordon said. “Low-income residents are not going to be able to get off work. They’re not going to have time to go to Hillsborough.â€
Summers said the health department would provide bus vouchers to patients who needed to travel from the southern part of the county to the Hillsborough dental clinic.
Other commissioners said that while the decision was painful, the money wasn’t available to fund two full-time clinics.
“Staff isn’t going to be able to find $240,000 extra for us. If they could’ve, they would have,†Commissioner Pam Hemminger said. “I think if we put [the dental services] all together … we’re going to serve more individuals in this county who need service than we’re serving now, except for the fact that they’re going to be distributed differently.
“We need to do something. What we’re doing is not working,†she said.
Commissioner Steve Yuhasz agreed.
“The board of health came to the conclusion reluctantly but nonetheless necessarily that a single clinic located in Hillsborough that would be open five days a week that would serve all of the county would be the most effective way to provide dental service to the county at this time,†Yuhasz said. “It’s important that we come to this decision.â€
Officials stressed that they hoped the single-clinic model would be temporary and added that they planned to have two full-time clinics open by 2021.